Catholics More Progressive Than Vatican, And Almost Everyon

[teflepi]

Catholics Are More Progressive Than The Vatican, And Almost Everyone Else

Pope Francis arrives in St. Peter's Square to attend the weekly general audience, at the Vatican on Wednesday.
Gregorio Borgia / AP
Pope Francis arrives in St. Peter’s Square to attend the weekly general audience, at the Vatican on Wednesday.

Gregorio Borgia / AP

Roman Catholic bishops released a draft document this week calling for the church to welcome gays, unmarried couples and people who have divorced. The document is proving to be highly controversial among conservative Catholics, and the official English translation already has had some of the welcoming tone revised out of it. But several public-opinion polls suggest that Catholics in many countries are ready to accept such change — more ready than members of many other religions.

In the U.S, the General Social Survey, which is conducted by the research organization NORC at the University of Chicago, has been asking about divorce and gay rights since the early 1970s, and about cohabitation since 1994 (typically at least every two years). At my request, GSS director Tom W. Smith sent data, broken down by religion, for half a dozen questions. In their answers, American Catholics consistently have shown themselves to be more tolerant of divorce, gay rights and unmarried cohabitation than have American Protestants and Americans overall — especially in recent years.

In all but one of the 14 GSS polls over the last quarter century, more Catholics than Protestants said divorce should be easier to get by law. In every survey since 1973, more Catholics than Protestants said gays should be allowed to speak publicly, teach and have books they wrote available in libraries. (If those questions don’t sound like they go very far by today’s standards, keep in mind that the Vatican isn’t going all that far, either, and that when these questions were asked in 1973, more than a third of Americans didn’t agree — half, in the case of teaching.) Also in each survey, more Catholics than Protestants said gay sex was “not wrong at all.” And all four times the GSS asked whether a couple living together unmarried was acceptable, more Catholics than Protestants said it was.

bialik-datalab-vatican-1bialik-datalab-vatican-3bialik-datalab-vatican-2bialik-datalab-vatican-4

A similar pattern emerges in recent international surveys. We didn’t have data broken down by religion in individual countries, so instead I examined how attitudes within countries corresponded with the percentage of their population that is Catholic. In general, the higher a share of a country’s residents are Catholic, the higher percentage of residents express tolerance toward divorce and towards gays. The effect isn’t huge, but it’s consistent.

I examined the responses to three survey questions by the Pew Research Center’s Global Attitudes Project. One asked if respondents believe homosexuality is morally acceptable. Another asked if homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society. A third asked if divorce is morally acceptable. For each question, I compared the percentage who said homosexuality or divorce was acceptable with the percentage of the population that is Catholic, for those countries for which I could find the data. And in each case, the correlation between the Catholic population percentage and the percentage who accepted divorce or homosexuality was positive (with R ranging from 0.39 to 0.54).

bialik-datalab-vatican-5bialik-datalab-vatican-6

Methodology note: I used the most recent United Nations religion data. For countries missing from the U.N. data set, I used data from Catholic-hierarchy.org. For 17 countries, I had data from both sources, which I used to make sure the two sources were consistent. They were very closely correlated — R=0.96 — but the Catholic-hierarchy.org estimate of the percentage of the population that is Catholic was, on average, 10 percent (not percentage points) higher than the U.N.’s estimate for the same country, so I adjusted the Catholic-hierarchy.org estimates downward accordingly. When I was done, I had estimates for the Catholic population share for between 34 and 43 countries for each of the three Pew questions.

CORRECTION (October 17, 5:48 p.m.): An earlier version of this post used an incorrect estimate for the percentage of Czechs who are Catholics, resulting in errors in the last two charts. The charts have been updated.

fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/catholics-are-more-progressive-than-the-vatican-and-almost-everyone-else/

[karinothing]

Oct 19, 2014 10:29:18 GMT -5 trident0 said:

Interesting. I wonder if some of the reason for this is because perhaps there are more casual catholics than casual protestants? If you asked me my religion, I'd say Catholic, but I don't attend services regularly. It is something I consider part of my identity and culture. I wonder if Protestants are the same way or not.

This and i think a lot of folks are drawn to the Church for suicidal justice issues, the vast majority of which are more progressive. I mean when the church stresses taking care of those that are less fortunate and takes a very active stance fighting for universal health care and pro immigration policies, it is hard not to be progressive

[litebright]

I think that one factor is that Catholics have always had a non-marriage, non-man+woman option for both sexes -- the religious life, whether that was as priest or monk or nun. In my admittedly limited experience as a non-Catholic who went to a Catholic HS, married a Catholic and attends Catholic church, there is a level of implicit understanding that some of the people in the religious life are gay and well, it didn't matter because they weren't acting on it, just like it wasn't supposed to matter if a priest was attractive because they were kind of "beyond" straight or gay since they'd all opted out.

There's a really interesting mindset there of being able to consider a person wholly separately from whether they choose to have sex -- and I suspect that some of it carries over to *how* you have sex, i.e. whether you're gay or not. You can argue that gay people who felt deeply spiritual, and even some that didn't, turned to the religious life because they felt they had no other option, and that's definitely true, and of course openness without persecution would've been preferable -- but I also think that that the option of choosing the religious life made gay people "safe" and put them in positions of power and influence in the church so that people saw them running things, trusted them/got to know them and gee, the world didn't fall apart. You don't have that in Protestant churches, and I think on some level there is pressure in a different way, that religious leaders who are not married are suspect. So if you are gay you either have a much harder road for people to trust you because they're always wondering in the back of their minds why you're not married, or you have to build a life that is straight but a lie. In Catholicism there's a "don't ask, don't tell, don't act" out that is highly respected.

I also ran into a few teachers at my all-girls Catholic HS who weren't openly gay, but everybody pretty much just understood, and understood that you didn't bring it up, that it was their personal business (plus, they were adults and we were students) and they were to be respected so long as they taught the church's rules about it all and that whatever they did on their personal time was discreet. Whereas at the public HS in my hometown, even a whiff of the gay would've gotten you the side-eye and probably harassment from students and/or parents even if you didn't say or do a single thing out of line. I think it's a far smaller step to go from "don't ask, don't tell, but we know you're there" into openness than it is to go from "what, gay people??!??! We don't have those in our church!!!" and discovering that yes, you do.

[wawa]

The first thing that popped into my head was education. Im far from an expert but anecdotally it seems like the catholic culture has historically (and currently) valued education more than protestants.

[wawa]

asdfjkl that is fascinating. And partially explains something ive always wondered abut...why so many pagans ive met are former Catholics. The hippy camp where I worked had tons of people who would casually flip back and forth from lighting candles to st. Wherever and worshipping random earth goddesses.

The whole god is part of us, the earth, love, beauty, etc is definitely a constant there.

[NewOrleans]

Oct 19, 2014 10:53:58 GMT -5 karinothing said:

Oct 19, 2014 10:29:18 GMT -5 trident0 said:

Interesting. I wonder if some of the reason for this is because perhaps there are more casual catholics than casual protestants? If you asked me my religion, I'd say Catholic, but I don't attend services regularly. It is something I consider part of my identity and culture. I wonder if Protestants are the same way or not.

 a lot of folks are drawn to the Church for suicidal justice issues, 

(wilted)

[karinothing]

Oct 19, 2014 15:09:46 GMT -5 NewOrleans said:

Oct 19, 2014 10:53:58 GMT -5 karinothing said:

 a lot of folks are drawn to the Church for suicidal justice issues, 

(wilted)

Ha ha stupid auto correct

[onthemove]

How much of this though has to do with Protestant being a catch all for everyone else. I'ld say there is a pretty big difference between Lutherans and Episcapalians from Southern Baptists.

[kapoentje]

Oct 19, 2014 16:38:13 GMT -5 asdfjkl said:

Oct 19, 2014 16:15:46 GMT -5 onthemove said:

How much of this though has to do with Protestant being a catch all for everyone else. I'ld say there is a pretty big difference between Lutherans and Episcapalians from Southern Baptists.

Greeley and Tracy would probably say not much because their data hold up across different countries where catholics will be doctrinally identical, but protestants will not. Swedes will be Lutheran, Germans will be methodist, Brits will be Anglican, etc...

Unless I'm mistaken, Germans will rarely, if ever, be Methodists. Lutherans predominantly maybe a few Calvinists, but not Methodists. Methodism had it's start in Britain (John Wesley) but really took off here.

I see what you're saying but I think onthemove makes an important point re: the OP which focuses on Catholics vs. (all) Protestants and primarily in an American context. Protestants definitely do run the gamut, assuming we're including both mainline & non mainline, liturgical & non liturgical, evangelical & non evangelical, etc.  So I'm an Episcopalian (and a high church one at that) and I was raised to regard my church as Protestant, yes, but also as a middle road between the Roman Catholic Church and other Protestant denominations -- Via Media and all that. Ideologically and even doctrinally I have much more in common with most Catholics than I do with an individual evangelical non denominational Protestant.

[kapoentje]

Oct 19, 2014 18:43:46 GMT -5 asdfjkl said:

Oct 19, 2014 17:28:45 GMT -5 kapoentje said:

Unless I'm mistaken, Germans will rarely, if ever, be Methodists. Lutherans predominantly maybe a few Calvinists, but not Methodists. Methodism had it's start in Britain (John Wesley) but really took off here.

I see what you're saying but I think onthemove makes an important point re: the OP which focuses on Catholics vs. (all) Protestants and primarily in an American context. Protestants definitely do run the gamut, assuming we're including both mainline & non mainline, liturgical & non liturgical, evangelical & non evangelical, etc.  So I'm an Episcopalian (and a high church one at that) and I was raised to regard my church as Protestant, yes, but also as a middle road between the Roman Catholic Church and other Protestant denominations -- Via Media and all that. Ideologically and even doctrinally I have much more in common with most Catholics than I do with an individual evangelical non denominational Protestant.

I don't really know where methodist come from. My busband is a german methodist so i thought they'd gotten some kind of foothold in Germany. But that's not really my point. My point is that this is not new research, that it bears out across different countries so is unlikely to be the result of "American Catholics" v. Some catchall definition of "Protestant", and there is data to suggest that the presence of a symbolic or analogical God in Catholicism, which is absent in any form of Protestantism is playing some role in this. That research started in the early 80s and the literature on it is, I'm learning, very deep, very active, and pretty consistent.

To clarify, I don't disagree with the notion that American & European Catholics are by and large progressively minded, whether due to an analogical God or otherwise. In my own experience I have very often found this to be true.

I do, however, find an assertion (by the author of the OP) like this:

American Catholics consistently have shown themselves to be more tolerant of divorce, gay rights and unmarried cohabitation than have American Protestants

to be misleading and more than a little lazy by not even acknowledging that American Protestants are in fact a hugely varied group of a number of different denominations which, like you've previously observed, often differ significantly along ideological and even doctrinal lines.

I understand that it serves the point he's trying to make, but by doing so he's also overgeneralizing and thereby misrepresenting a significant number of progressively minded Protestants.

[ttt]

I don't know. The charts show that yes, Catholics as a group are definitely more progressive than the overall Protestant category, but only marginally moreso than the general population in the US.

I'd be interested to see the numbers for other groups - Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists, etc. - and see how that compares.

ETA: I'd also be interested to see the difference between practicing Catholics and non-practicing Catholics. 

[tacosforlife]

I'm just not sure how meaningful it is to talk about Protestants as a single group because like @kapoentje said, there is a huge range.

As anther Episcopalian, I feel more kinship with the Catholic Church than I do with the Pentecostal church, for example. Heck, if you told me that I had to go to church right now and my only options were a Baptist church and a Catholic church, I'd choose Catholic.

Without breaking it down by denomination, I just find this misses a lot of the nuanced differences that likely impact why people choose those very denominations.

I'm sure part of why kapoentje and I are raising our eyebrows is because the Episcopal church confirmed a gay bishop a decade ago and has a female presiding bishop. So to us it seems ridiculous to say that Catholics are more progressive than this monolithic Protestants group without discussing the Protestant denominations that are more progressive than Catholics.

[5thofjuly]

Adding little to the article except to say that when sociologists use "religion" as a variable, we tend to divide Protestants into "Liberal" and "Evangelical" because it is too broad a brush to just say "Protestant."